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Video Airship Patent Awarded

Vast, spherical video-airships, their frames entirely covered in a matrix of 7 61 million LEDs, their very propulsion systems concealed by advertising, might soon be hovering over the U.S. from sea to shining sea. The Patent Office has awarded a patent on the airships to a N.Y. inventor, Tom Shannon, who has been working on the design, named “Air Genie,” for years.

“It’s a historical development of airships and media,” Shannon said Thursday. “It’s pretty extraordinary, if it gets built.”

The proposed all-glowing neo-dirigible would be 35m in diameter, holding 22,5003 meters of helium, and weigh some 20,000 kg. The 7m LEDs would cost about $36m and add another 1,300 kilos to the airship’s weight — and a need for more than a kilowatt of juice to power them.

Getting it off the drawing board and making it real is the next step.

“I’m trying to put together the financing to build and operate them,” Shannon saud, “Hopefully the patent will help in that regard.”

The airship’s huge size, it turns out, isn’t optional: the weight of the electrical propulsion system hidden within demands an enormous volume of helium—”You can only lift about a kilo per cubic meter”—to provide sufficient lift. Advertisers won’t be disappointed, however: the 3,848 square meters of surface area thus created offers ample space to get a message across.

UPDATE: Air Genie’s unusual propulsion system is what permits the ship’s design. From Shannon himself:

“Supporting the general concept of the Air Genie is the novel computer-controlled electric propulsion/control system created in the course of the study AeroVironment, performed to determine the video airship’s feasibility. The system enables the sphere to slip through the air smoothly by effectively controlling the boundary layer.”